I very recently switched roles, in relatively quick succession. In mid-2017 I was hired to the Turnitin team as they began to transition towards an iterative Java shop, and required Java developers to help upskill their teams. I held a fair number of training workshops for their existing engineers and began leading development on a couple of their early projects. The office was great, the people smart and I was enjoying my time there. I progressed professionally relatively quickly, as I was given ample opportunity to run with new aspects of engineering that were not previously part of the U.K. engineering teams SDLC.

The shift

The the 23th July, 2018 only really a year or so after I’d joined Turnitin, I was reached out to by talent acquisition specialist working for Cloudbees, offering an opportunity working with some technology that I’d had some exposure to at Turnitin, and a salary that didn’t really belong given my geo.

We went through several bouts of interview (I think the count was 7), with different engineers and different teams, all of this was super positive, the company seemed attractive, the tech stack and the financial proposition was hard to turn my nose up at. I was going to be on the architecture team, something that at least in my mind sounded super exciting on a CV!

I handed in my notice at Turnitin and began work for Cloudbees on the 17th September the turnaround was relatively fast. It was pretty apparent from the get-go that things were not quite as I’d imagined them when signing my offer of employment. The team was in some disarray, an engineering reorganization was occurring, and there was very little direction to get me and the handful of new employees started.

Over the course of my incredibly short tenure at Cloudbees, there was a handful of team shifts, emails inviting me to places I had no business going and little to no development, operational work, or much of anything that didn’t involve reading documents. My manager at Cloudbees was sympathetic, acknowledged the poor timing of events and where credit is due, tried to make the best of the situation.

The return

I was pretty vocal about my discontent to ex-colleagues, one of them must’ve reached out to management because in October I received an email from one of Turnitin’s directors, wanting to talk about a position on his team. It was a shift from engineering to operations and I was super excited to be given the change to head back.

The teams at Turnitin are fantastic, and whilst no workplace is perfect, being somewhere with smart, creative people who have a solid vision and sense of direction is helpful both professionally and personally.

Never be too proud to look back, Cloudbees was a great experience but unfortunately not quite the right fit. I’m looking forward to my future at Turnitin.

Join the team

We’re hiring DevOps engineers in my office, come and work with me!. You’ll get to work on cool stuff in the Cloud, and help build and maintain our existing on-premise infrastructure!

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